


Little Girl Lost

by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters



Series: Aftermaths [5]
Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW Comics), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, F/F, Ghosts, Graphic Recollections of Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:55:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27338281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters/pseuds/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Summary: As she tries to cope with her new life and body, Jenny finds herself returning to old haunts and receiving guidance from a ghost.
Relationships: Jennika/Minor Character (Deceased)
Series: Aftermaths [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983247
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Little Girl Lost

Jennika can't sleep.

This happens sometimes. The weight of her shell--carapace, whatever--will press down on her back, cutting off her air ever so slightly, and every position she lies down in feels uncomfortable. Her head is cold, her new ear-slits make everything muffled, and the sheet pressing on her body will only highlight the total nonexistence of her breasts.

Not to mention the tiger fucking a snake next door. Jesus, how does that even _work?_ And why is she so jealous?

If she was back in Northampton, she could pry tips from the boys about sleeping in a shell. But she "commuted" to the city again a few weeks ago, unable to bear the heavy weight of all those awkward feelings, not to mention the endless silence of nature. Jenny is a city girl, used to noise--even the profane babble from her time in lock-up was better than that endless, muffling quiet.

So instead she finds herself wandering the dark streets of Mutant Town, flitting from building to building like a pigeon. She hears music blaring, families laughing and eating together, the happy murmurs of drunks. She hears lunatics down the street, screaming about how mutation was a punishment for everybody's sins, and in her darkest moment she wonders if they're right.

Sometimes she sees a dark shape dashing over the rooftops, sais glinting and a dinosaur riding his shoulder. He'll vanish into the streets every once in a while, only to reappear leaving groans of pain and the occasional grateful cry in his wake.

She hasn't worked up the courage to approach Raph. What would she say? "Sorry about your dad, who basically adopted me as a replacement for you during his phase as a murder-happy warlord. Will you accept me and all the baggage I carry into your maladjusted teenage heart?"

On some nights, she goes to help Alopex at her shelter. Whenever she's there, though, Jenny can't feeling jealous of how much the fox has her life in order. Alopex has been through as much hell as Jenny has, if not worse, and she's functioning? Living well? Running a fucking _nonprofit_ without breaking a sweat? What's up with that? What's up with her?

What's up with Jenny?

Other nights, she goes to the dance clubs, losing herself in blaring music and the occasional fistfight. Occasionally she'll find herself actually praying that some dick will harass her, so she can have an excuse to kick ass and feel in control of herself again.

One time she actually went home with a cute-looking wolf boy and it ended in total humiliation. Jenny spent five minutes figuring out how to expose her stupid turtle vagina, only for him to stare at her for several seconds before saying, "I thought you were a dude."

Resisting the urge to break his jaw (it wasn't the poor bastard's fault that the club's malfunctioning smoke machine had made her voice husky, and she'd probably fucked up with the eyeliner), she slunk out of his window and spent the rest of the night drinking away her sorrows in the privacy of her room.

But tonight, she thinks, is not a night for social contact or ear-splitting music. Nor is it a night for getting smashed to the lovely sounds of Tigress and Viper boning each other's brains out.

So Jennika wanders. She thinks. She tries to be positive, and she fails.

And her thoughts lead, as they so often do when unguarded, to memories of Karai's hard eyes and the very special agony that comes from having a sword thrust through your guts, a burning red violation.

She remembers waking up to find her old skin peeled off like a banana, and discovering that the ones responsible are the people who love her most in the world.

She remembers heaps of corpses at her feet, their eyes blank and calm, because they knew she would get her comeuppance one day and she didn't.

She breaks down near someone's chimney and decides to go get stoned, because tonight is not a night to be free of chemicals.

"Crazy world out there," the raccoon mutters, fidgeting with the plastic bag of pot. He's clearly on something much stronger than marijuana, if his twitching face and vibrating tail are any indication. "Saw a guy with red eyes talkin' to a bunch of rats last week, looked like a strung-out Loki. You know?"

"Not really," Jenny replies, holding out some of the cash she maybe sort of lifted from the Foot Clan's reservoirs following the chaos of their final battle. A girl has to be prepared.

"They say that Batman's comin' back," he says, finally handing over the bag. "Been runnin' around savin' people, got a dino sidekick and shit." The raccoon grins, showing oversized, rotting incisors. "Can't keep the Bat down, dude. I mean, that mutagen shit even looks like the shit in the Lazarus Pit." He giggles. "Fuck, huh, I made a rhyme."

"Yep," Jennika mumbles, walking away. _Batman_. God, she hopes Raph never hears that one, or he'll be even more insufferable.

 _Well, why shouldn't he proud?_ a little voice asks. _He's actually been doing shit, helping people. What have you_ _been_ _doing?_ She pushes the voices away with a growl.

She buys a lighter from the convenience store and returns to the rooftops, looking for a decent place to get high. Maybe in front of one of those stupid cosmetics billboards, so she can dump her ashes onto the model's ti--

Jenny skitters to a stop, because she recognizes the abandoned building looming out of the shadows in front of her, and few of the memories are good.

She was raised in this apartment complex, took her first steps in its courtyard. Here is where her father beat the shit out of her mother on a regular basis and no one ever seemed to care. Here is where Jenny was chased into the night, panting and terrified, driven out to hook and beg and survive off the kindness of the lunatics she called friends until she stumbled into an ill-advised life of crime.

Here is where she returned, clad in black and sprouting demon's claws, with murder on her mind.

Her first instinct is to run, so she immediately makes for the window she recognizes as leading into her apartment, because she refuses to let a few ghosts tell her what to do.

The apartment is filthy, spattered with graffiti and peeling signs for rebuilding that never happened and now never will. She can hear the voices and movements of squatters above and below, but the apartment itself is empty.

She wonders if people stay away on purpose, because they've heard the stories about the widower who was found here clutching his spilled intestines, his face frozen in an expression of shocked recognition. Jenny tells herself that thinking like that is ridiculous, and almost believes it.

When she passes the living room she looks around carefully, but doesn't see any bloodstains. The police did a very good job of cleaning up.

Jenny stands at her bedroom doorway and remembers the day her father slunk through it, smelling of booze and already pulling his cock out of his pants. By some miracle she didn't freeze up, kicking him in the crotch and making him howl. She got dressed and shoved her shit into a bag while running on pure adrenaline, before he chased her out of the apartment, swinging his fists and screaming hateful gibberish.

Her mother was huddling in the corner the whole time, weeping to herself, not even registering Jenny's tearful pleas to help. She died before Jenny returned; if she hadn't...Jenny doesn't know what she had done.

She remembers a story Leo told her back at the farmhouse, when his usual reserve was weakened by grief and anxiety (not to mention the bottle of booze she'd found in the cupboard and poured into both their cups of coffee, because fuck propriety, Splinter was dead).

It was about the night his mother died, about how she'd stood between her sons and Oroku Saki's assassin, pleading for their lives instead of her own. For a heartbeat, Jenny had been almost jealous, wondering what it would be like to have a mother who'd go to such lengths to protect her.

Then she'd felt nauseated because she'd murdered someone in practically the same way that Tang Shen had been murdered, in front of Leo and his brothers on Splinter's orders. If their positions were reversed, she realized, she would have beaten the shit out of Leo.

She'd asked Leo to talk about something else, and he'd obliged by describing the day he and his surviving family members had had their heads chopped off, in very vivid detail. Which had led to a confession that sometimes, every once in a great while, he wished they could have stayed in the afterlife with their mother.

Then he'd burst into tears and passed out. Jennika had gone into the bathroom to throw up, before scribbling a note and darted out of the house as fast as humanly possible.

Jenny hates Leo for planting such thoughts in her head. She hates herself for bolting on him, since he had to talk with someone about this shit and she'd literally made herself available, not to mention that he probably felt terrible about it if he remembered the incident at all. She hates Oroku Saki for fucking up the Hamato's lives and she hates Splinter for not being able to protect them. She hates her parents for being such incompetent assholes, and she hates Karai for getting her mutated so she can't even cry to a therapist about any of this bullshit. She hates Hob for setting off the mutagen bomb, and the EPF for cutting her off from the city she loves by regulating mutants to this cokehead Zootopia.

All that hate presses down on her, crushing her, so she decides to get away from it as fast as she can by getting stoned.

She flounces into her old room, very carefully ignoring the dusty crap on the walls and in the corners because she's no longer a child and has moved beyond that shit. She flops onto the bed, sending up a filthy mushroom cloud, and sets about making herself feel better.

"Hey, Jenny."

She's lying on her bed, which is suspended in nothingness like some kind of dream sequence from a shitty art film. Sitting crosslegged at the far end is a dead girl with long dark hair and sharp, warm eyes.

Jenny sits up and groans, rubbing her head. "Fuck," she says to no one in particular. "Why do I always forget that I have weird dreams when I'm stoned?"

Lila shrugs, flashing the kind of crooked smile Jenny never thought she'd see again until she met Casey Jones. _Casey_. Ugh, what a flesh-eating bundle of worms that is.

"Seriously?" Lila asks. "I'm _much_ hotter than that angsty white boy, and we both know it."

Jenny stares. "Are you reading my mind?"

"This _is_ your mind, dummy," Lila says. "It's impossible not to be aware of what it's up to."

Before Jenny can reply, Lila flips onto all fours and crawls towards her, so that Jenny can see her breasts very very clearly through a Chemical Romance T-shirt. Jenny's never seen that shirt in real life, but she remembers how Lila talking about how much she missed it while tugging on her orange juvie uniform. "I missed you, lover," she croons, and Jenny's breath catches.

She reaches out, because if even this is a dream she's going to goddamn take advantage of it, only to jerk backwards when she realizes that her hand is green with three fingers.

"Fuck!" Jenny gasps, lurking back against the headboard. "Shit, I...thought I was going to be human. I usually am in dreams."

"So?'' Lila asks, propping her delicate chin on her elbows and pouting.

" _So?_ " Jenny barks out a harsh laugh, gesturing at her body: blocky plastron, lumpy shell, the fucking _tail_ she has to keep tucked up against her asshole all the damn time. "Look at me!"

"I am," Lila replies, running her eyes up and down Jenny's form. "You've still got all of those yummy muscles I worked so hard to pack on you, only now they're even bigger and _everyone_ can see them." She sits back upright, licking her lips.

Jenny scoffs. "You're just saying that because you're a manifestation of my subconscious."

"Darling," Lila says, her face growing serious for the first time. "If I was really a manifestation of your subconscious, I'd be screaming about what a bloodthirsty fuckup you are."

"Well, you are," says Jenny, her voice quiet as she looks away, "and I am."

"I'm not," says Lila, her words low and stern, drawing Jenny's eyes back to her. "And you're not."

Jenny flops back on the pillows with a groan. "Well, what are you supposed to be, then? A ghost?"

Lila winks.

Jenny raises an eyebrow.

"Well, why the hell not?" Lila bursts out. "Splinter told you all about being visited by Tang Shen, right? I mean, the lady was persistent, and she had balls, but she wasn't the _only_ one who could bother the living in a pinch."

Jenny blinks. "Was?"

Lila waves a dismissive hand. "Eh...it's complicated. Reincarnation and all that jazz, spooky shit."

Jenny just looks at her for a few seconds before saying, words slow and careful as feet on broken glass, "If you're real, why didn't you visit me before?"

She sits up, her words hardening. "Hell, why didn't you tell me how much I was fucking my life up with the Foot Clan? Why did you tell me to go those assholes in the first place?"

Lila sighs and says, "Well, when I was alive...I pretty much worshipped the ground Oroku Saki shat on. And when I was dead, hindsight told me that the Foot Clan was basically the least of all evils in a city pretty much crawling with them. You had a purpose, a semi-safe place, a way to hone your skills--eventually, you had Splinter in the turtles. It sure as shit wasn't perfect, but it kept you going. And now..."

"My life is a trash fire," Jenny says quietly.

Lila shrugs again. "It's not ideal."

"Not _ideal?!"_ Jenny bursts out. "I've killed more people than I can fucking _remember_ , New York brought back the _ghetto system_ for mutants, the clan that was my _life_ is being run by the crazy bitch who _stabbed_ me, my boyfriend dumped me because I look like a _Martian_ , the closest thing I've ever had to a father is _dead_ , and my only remaining connection with him is four fucked-up teenage boys that I've got _jack_ in common with."

For a moment she just stares at Lila, panting, feeling hot tears burn her eyes and blinking them away.

Lila scoots forward, and when she speaks her voice is gentle. "Okay, first of all, Casey was going to dump you eventually. You were pretty much a rebound girl after things ended with the redhead." Jenny opens her mouth to protest, but Lila cuts her off. "Hush, darling, you know it's true.

"Second, Karai's a psychotic piece of shit, but she will get her comeuppance sooner or later because that's what happens to all psychotic pieces of shit. I know that, because I'm dead and the crazy fuckers always cross over first.

"Third, you've done bad things, true, but you've always stuck to killing bad people--including the cunt who killed me, something I greatly appreciated--which means you're not beyond redemption. Splinter was teaching you not to kill, sure, but he was also teaching you to forgive yourself.

"Fourth, if you want to help out in Mutant Town, it won't be too hard to keep an eye on things, lend a hand once in a while. You don't have to dress up like Kermit the Goth in order to protect people.

"Fifth, they need you."

Jenny blinks. "Who?"

"Splinter's sons," Lila says, as if it was obvious. "You said it yourself--they're fucked up, and they're going to have an even harder time coping with the new world order than you."

Jenny stares. "And I'm supposed to _help_ them? I'm as fucked up as they are--probably worse."

"No," Lila shakes her head. "Your life hasn't been worse than theirs, just different. You've all done bad things, you all have different scars, but you can take all the broken pieces and make a whole."

She sighs to herself. "Splinter may have had his...flaws, but he taught you how to work together and deal with the shit as a team. And that's what you need to do now."

Jenny throws up her hands. "Even if I wanted to play nanny--which I don't--where would I even start?"

"Getting them all in the same room, for one. You'll have to track Raph down first--don't scowl at me, you two are birds of a feather and you both know it. Try Alopex; if they're not fucking yet they will be soon, and she wants the band back together as much as I do, I bet."

Lila chews on her lip thoughtfully. "When--not if, when--they go back to Mutant Town, they'll need someone to show them the ropes. They were human once, sure, but they spent most of their first lives hiding out in the fucking woods and they don't know jack about modern society. They'll need someone to teach them how to buy groceries and bully them into wearing pants."

She leans forward, looking at Jenny with a piercing gaze that's so familiar it makes her heart hurt. "But, really, they don't need a leader or a nanny--to be honest, they've probably got that in Leo. They need an overseer: someone to drag Donnie out of his lab every once in a while, someone to pop Raph a good one when he's acting like a psycho, someone to keep Leo from turning into a little green Splinter, someone for Mikey to go to when he needs a shoulder to cry on."

Jenny leans back, exhausted just thinking about it. "That sounds like a lot."

"It is. It'll be painful, and hard, and everybody will fuck up at one point another."

"Then why do I even bother?"

"Because," Lila leans over her suddenly, planting her hands on either side of Jenny's head. "You need someone to take care you of as much as they do. And because now that the Foot Clan is gone, you need a purpose more than you've ever needed anything. This is it."

Jenny trembles: at the bittersweet memories that come with Lila's voice, at how wonderful it feels to be near her again, at the words she's saying and what they mean for her future.

"Will you try?" Lila asks, her hair brushing Jenny's scalp.

She swallows. "I--I will. I promise."

Lila smiles, warm and relaxed as she almost never was in life. "Good."

"I'm sorry I couldn't save you," Jenny murmurs. Tears trickle down her cheeks, and she lets them fall.

Lila keeps smiling. "It's okay." She leans down, her breath soft and warm on Jenny's face. "You'll save them, as many times as it takes."

Her eyes are filling up Jennika's world now, shining with an inner light. "Time to wake up, sweet princess." Their lips meet.

Jenny wakes up with her face pressed into a pillow soaked by tears and drool; the faint scent of pot still hovers in the air. She sits up with a sigh, rubbing the crust of out her eyes. Sunshine streams in through her bedroom window, accompanied by faint birdsong and the thunderous chatter of a city waking up.

"I promise," she whispers to the air.

Then she climbs out the window and goes to face the coming day.


End file.
